Category Archives: ballads

The song is by Tatsuro Mashiko, and the piano player and producer is Satoshi Takabe. The song was composed after 9/11 and released in 2004. Picture quality is poor here but the sound comes out OK. Dogwood is “mizuki” in Japanese (“water tree”).

This song also became the theme for the bullet train “Christmas Express” commercials (1998-1992), one of the most romantic CM campaigns ever, compiled here:

This is the English version of the song. A bit lost in translation, but it’s still good:

Addendum: I just noticed a detail in the first JR CM. You can see the breath/steam of the boyfriend hiding behind the station platform pillar at 0:18-0:19, before he appears to surprise his girlfriend. Nice touch!

Uh, roger on that digital retrieval, sir. We do have a lock on it. Repeat. We do have a lock. Shall I code in that retrieval, sir?

Make it so.Signal retrieved sir, and unscrambled.

Excellent.

Captains log, Stardate 71289.4. We appear to have captured a digital artifact dating from the early 21st Terran century. The image is apparently of a Terran female entertainer identified as “Deb.” Though she appears to be addressing another female in the accompanying text, linguistic analysis suggests a different author than the woman in the image, possibly male. Although the message appears to be an invitation composed in 21st Century English, the text is heavily obscured by symbols with no apparent meaning. Could it be the degradation of the signal over time? Or could the mysterious symbols be a code of some sort? Encryption analysis has not made any progress. In the end, we have only questions. Who sent this message? Who was it intended for? And above all, what is it an invitation to do? Though we will eventually deliver this artifact to Star Fleet archives, it may remain a mystery for all time . . . and perhaps beyond time itself.